RUTH HAZLETON – HERONBONES: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
RUTH HAZLETON
Heronbones (independent)
SOMEWHERE IN THE ELDTRITCH environs of Tri-Coloured House, between Ruth Hazleton’s questioning voice and the displaced-from-this-realm one of Aoife Nic Dhiarmada, between the echoing drum loop and the repeating banjo, between the wheezy synth and edging-in violin, “between the saltwater and the sea sand”, lies the core of Heronbones: contested space.
As Hazleton navigates this tale of nature being put to impossible service as proof of love, instrumental elements step forward and back like rival suitors seeking signs of welcome. Each makes a case, maybe with a grey-speckled modernity or an earthier hue, and if the latter has a dominant position, it is not a clinching argument. Similarly, while Hazleton’s is the lead voice, setting the direction, the way Nic Dhiarmada’s flows across and around it creates a counterpoint that grows in stature.
Hazleton and co-producer/collaborator Luke Plumb make room for contradictions that aren’t contradicting at all but are instead interlocked. Folk music in their hands is not a question of traditional song versus electronic instruments, or old narratives versus modern interpretation, just multiple routes around the same land.
There is even more space in the Hazleton original-based-on-a-traditional The Heron (Two Sisters) which is airy, almost flighty, even as the murdering sibling ploughs through the ringing tone and marching banjo and we hear that “Love does not make women free/Nor does murder bring peace to thee”. But there’s a growing reverberation that begins to feel uneasy just as the song drifts away, only for that unease to thicken in Molly Baun Lavery where electric shimmers and Hazleton’s dispassionate delivery unsettles further.
In all three of these songs we find ourselves within the tale, pushed and pulled by the human as much as musical forces within, and so involved that we have no thought to location and timing: the stories may be 200 or 300 years old, the language untouched – Hazleton is a scholar and collector of the form – but everything feels immediate. In that space the contest is between our judgements of good and evil, or what passes for those, and the special pleading of those protagonists appealing directly to us.
(And for those not pleading? Sometimes the damned know it already and have made a kind of peace.)
Around the traditional songs – including the brutal iniquities of Rufford Park Poachers, told in a rolling, sea shanty-like inevitability, and the eerie edges and defiance of The Wagoner’s Lad, where creeping displacement never allows a listener to settle comfortably – Hazleton places original songs which feel like fellow travellers. Occasionally disturbing ones, such as The Returning (Selkie), which slowly tumbles over its rhythm, backwards and forwards like its sounds, hollowed out and wary-eyed.
In the burbling, beeping, circular flow of the opening track, Letter From A Friend (Fire Song), the destructive path of fire, on the immediate scorched earth but then in the minds of its survivors, passes through with a gentleness that partially hides its force and how it inhabits you. That hits most in the accumulation of harm done, the dreams that bring it back, with the little triggers of individual moments (“The absence of birdsong/And ash where our cottage would be”) potent in retrospect.
Closing the record, Foreign Shores, weighs up the burden of a story collector who takes in the lives of many in all their varied pleasures and pain. There is a stately element to it, a tone of respectful listening in the low glistening, but the percussion and wordless backing vocals speak of what else flows into that space, the heaviness of stories that jostle for attention not just for the listener but in those who have lived it.
It's not an easy space, it will always be contested, but Heronbones finds a home in it.
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BANDCAMP: Listen to Ruth Hazleton – Heronbones